Currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney is Julie Rrap‘s retrospective “Body Double“. Spanning the last 25 years of the artist’s career, this exhibition is an evocative exploration of the human body. With particular emphasis on the female form, Rrap’s photographic, sculptural, video and installation pieces explore issues of feminism and identity. Rrap uses herself as a key figure in many of the works, creating casts of her own body, photographing herself and even utilizing her own hair and bodily fluids. Appropriation is a tool widely used by Rrap as her early works include a photomontage of herself as Christ, while others include her own naked body fused with artworks created by the ‘great masters,’ such as Rembrandt and Munch. Rrap currently lives and works in Sydney. Her work has been displayed on a global scale, appearing within solo exhibitions at the Galerie Eric Franck, Switzerland and Ecole des Beaux Arts, France.

Opening this weekend at the Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester, UK will be a selection of posters, prints, paintings, drawings and etchings by Chicago-based artists Jay Ryan and Diana Sudyka. The two screen-print artists have been working in this medium since 1995, and own their own printing company The Bird Machine, in the Chicago area. Sudyka received her MFA from Northwestern University and currently works as a freelance illustrator and printmaker. Ryan’s work incorporates children’s book illustrations with hand drawn lettering. His designs have been used by The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth and Stereo Lab among many others. His most ambitious project to date is “100 Posters, 134 Squirrels” which documents his artistic career over the past ten years. In regards to his work, Ryan has stated “One of the most important lessons I learned in school, from a teacher, was to lower my expectations of my work and be receptive to silliness, chance, and the development of a drawing in the process. Also, I think animals are funny.”

Belgian-born artist Stefan Annerel creates abstract paintings that attempt to challenge the sensory perception of the viewer. Upon first glance the artist’s works appear glossy and non-representation, however with greater inspection the viewer will find a rich surface of layers, some of which may look like paint but are actually collaged tape or fabric, while others appear strictly abstract and then suddenly reveal themselves to be figurative. The artist is inspired in part by patterns found in mass produced contemporary design and occasionally he will directly incorporate those exact fabrics in his work. Annerel often displays his work on patterned walls which act as visual support for the paintings to sit on, under or in between. Recent exhibitions for the artist include “Parallax” which is currently on view at Galerie Smits in Amsterdam, and “Rakelings” at Galerie C. De Vos in Aalst, Belgium.

Chicago-based artist J.A. Zimmermann creates massive outdoor paintings which reflect the communities and the built environment around the painting site. Zimmermann actively meets members of the Chicago community and represents them with an elevated and monumental stature. The artist has also become known for his small works which often depict vehicles such as ice cream trucks and police paddy wagons, as well as paintings of trash clumps which he has coined “urban tumble weeds.” Zimmerman received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has completed numerous exhibitions and large-scale public paintings in the US, Puerto Rico, Kenya and Peru. In the summer of 2003, the artist presented “Dark Matter” an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, and 2006 he completed their artist in residency program with a 38′ x 15′ painting titled “Thinking Out Load.”

Opening today at Victoria Miro in London,will be new work by artist Wangechi Mutu in her first UK solo exhibition. The artist will be making a departure from her earlier collages and installations with their highly critical, dark and confrontational themes and stepping into a renewed optimism and positive energy inherent in this new body of work.

The exhibition’s title Yo.n.I is derived from yoni, the Sanskrit word for “divine passage” or sacred space rooted in the worship of female creativity and sexual organ. With layers of visual metaphor, Mutu likes to force her viewers to question assumptions about race, gender, geography, history and beauty. Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and her MFA from Yale University School of Art. The artist was born in Nairobi, Kenya and currently lives and works in New York City.

New paintings by artist Mala Iqbal will be presented in an exhibition titled “Washed Away,” opening next week at PPOW in New York City. Iqbal’s work sits between traditional landscape painting with psychedelic drippy colors that are characteristic of graffiti and cartoon imagery. The distortion of the artist’s subjects causes the works to be rooted in fiction, existing somewhere on the boarder of abstraction and realism. The unnatural and sometimes acidity color palette adds to the physically surreal qualities in the work and further pushes the ability to successful mash-up many different cultural references. Iqbal currently lives and works in Brooklyn NY, and is an MFA graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design (1998). Since graduation, the artist has exhibited with Bellwether Gallery in New York and Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. Museum exhibitions include works in the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum. Iqbal has been included in publications such as New York Times (review) and BOMB Magazine, and will be included in an upcoming traveling exhibition titled “Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s,” opening in 2009.

Slater Bradley’s second solo exhibition at Los Angeles’ Blum & Poe Gallery uses video, sculpture, and drawing to rephrase outmoded and forgotten histories. The exhibition, titled “Hope From a Dark Place,” began as a drawing project and grew into a multi-media collaboration. Since False Killer Whales, a species of dolphins, are highly trainable and have a tendency toward suicidal behavior, Bradley explored the idea of lost identity by using scrimshaw to carve drawings of False Killer Whales into the ivory keys of a 1860s piano. The artist then collaborated with musician Max Seigel to compose a soundtrack for the exhibition and a tuxedo clad pianist will play the score at 3 PM every Saturday and Sunday until the exhibition’s end on December 22nd. “Hope From a Dark Place” also features two films, one a rephrasing of Thomas Edison’s 1903 panoramic view of Blackwell Island and the other a farce in which Bradley’s doppelganger changes from a 19th Century gentleman into Gene Kelly. The exhibition as a whole functions as an eerie environment of sounds, movements and historicisms. Bradley has exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2005, he received The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Video.